Slow Internet? Faulty Undersea Cable affects Internet speeds in South East Asia

If you’re having a slow internet experience, it is not just you. An undersea cable had broke recently and this is causing a slow down for international web traffic between South East Asia and the US. Considering most of our online content comes from US sites, this would greatly impact majority of internet users in the Malaysia.

The issue had started since Tuesday night and TM has issued an announcement that customers will be facing degradation of internet service. TM has updated that repair plans are under way and it is targeted to be completed by 6th October, subject to weather and sea conditions. As this is an international link, the problem isn’t isolated just to TM or Malaysia but it affects internet users around region.

The Asia-America Gateway Cable is a 20,000KM high bandwidth fibre optic connection that hooks up countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Hong Kong SAR, Philippines and Guam with the West Coast of US as well as to other interconnections with other major cable networks.

According to a report, the fault on the cable occurred somewhere between Hong Kong and Vietnam. This isn’t the first time and it probably won’t be the last time for a cable fault to occur. Most recently the cable had disruptions on 15th July 2014 and that took nearly 2 weeks for them to fix. 3 years back, the same cable had issues and that took about 2 months to restore.

[ SOURCE, 2, 3 ]